The Wi-Fi Alliance is a non-profit trade group that oversees the certification of new wireless standards, and earlier today they announced a new wireless specification with the potential to increase wireless transfer speeds by a factor of 10.
The new technology is called WiGig, and for the time being, is being positioned more as a complement to WiFi than as a replacement because it doesn’t have enough range to sufficiently “blanket a home”, according to Wi-Fi Alliance marketing director Kelly David-Felner. In the meantime, the Wi-Fi Alliance is partnering up with the Wireless Gigabit Alliance to lobby hardware manufacturers such as Linksys and D-Link to implement WiGig into their products.
But on to the sexy stuff.
WiGig has a transfer rate of 7 GB a second and can easily transmit HD video to and fro without breaking a sweat. Translation? Say goodbye to all of those pesky HDMI cables. For some context, the maximum transfer rate on today’s wireless 802.11n standard is 600 Mbps.
The possibilities of a WiGig world are damn near futuristic. Imagine, for example, being able to remotely stream live video from your iPhone to another users phone or computer. Tired of watching Hulu on your laptop? Wirelessly transmit that puppy over to your networked TV.
Interestingly, Apple may be working behind the scenes to help propel the wireless technology to the forefront. Despite the fact that new wireless technologies often take a few years before they catch on, WiGig Alliance Chairman and President Ali Sadri is confident that WiGig will see widespread adoption a tad more quickly. In discussing the matter, Sadri recently “pointed to Apple as an innovator in driving new technology uptake.” Sadri, though, refused to comment further on the extent of Apple’s involvement.
This, of course, isn’t the first we’ve heard of Apple driving revolutionary technologies behind the scenes. More concretely, Apple reportedly had a hand in helping develop Intel’s vaunted Light Peak transfer technology which has the potential to transfer an entire Blu-Ray movie in under 30 seconds.
via LA Times
May 11th, 2010 at 1:10 pm
The guy who used to drive all the wireless innovation inside Apple left a year and a half ago (hence all the Wi-Fi problems with the iPad), so don’t expect Apple to be leading anything in the wireless space anymore.